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There's clearly interest in a device that converges the tablet and notebook. ASUS saw some of the earliest success in this department with its Transformer line of Android tablets. Once the first Windows RT/8 designs started appearing, it became clear that everyone was aiming to deliver something that delivered the best of both worlds. Even listening to Intel's description of Haswell you can get a good idea for where part of the industry is headed: everyone is working towards delivering a platform/device that has the battery life and portability of a tablet, but with the performance and flexibility of a notebook PC. Apple has remained curiously quiet on this front, but I suspect that too will change in good time.

Could Surface Pro possibly fare any better than Surface RT did last year? Surprisingly, yes.

It's no secret why Dell's struggling so badly it just took a $2b loan from Microsoft and bought itself back from shareholders to become a private company: after more than a decade of effort, the company never figured out what consumers actually want beyond low prices, or why they might want it. You might laugh, but it's true — a look back at Dell's biggest attempts to crack the consumer market and compete with Apple over the past 10 years reveals an embarrassing series of missteps, mistakes, and flat-out bad software, culminating in a flurry of poorly-executed mobile devices in 2010 that sealed the company's fate.

A while ago, Google took its Street View cameras to the slopes and started documenting ski runs at a few select resorts. Today, Google is expanding its mapping options for skiers by adding 38 new run and lifts maps to Google Maps, including its apps for Android and iPhone. These include well-known ski resorts like Squaw Valley, Big Sky and Whistler Blackcomb.

BitTorrent Inc. is working on an application called Sync that uses P2P technology to sync your files between your devices.... The announcement blog post is somewhat scarce on details, but here’s what I’ve been told by the company: Sync will enable direct synchronization between your machines without any cloud caching. File transfers will be protected via 256 bit AES encryption. There are native apps for Mac OS, Windows and Linux, as well as a native NAS integration.

There is nothing more frustrating for a web developer than spending hours at a time fixing a bug that should just work. Often I’ll get stuck in a programming state that feels like I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, as if the language I’m using (CSS, PHP, whatever), is actually a foreign language.

What is the most bizarre language you have ever worked with?

Three sentences for getting success:a) Know more than others.b) Work more than others.c) Expect less than others.

Most modern programming languages do not consider white space characters (spaces, tabs and newlines) syntax, ignoring them, as if they weren’t there. We consider this to be a gross injustice to these perfectly friendly members of the character set. Should they be ignored, just because they are invisible? Whitespace is a language that seeks to redress the balance. Any non whitespace characters are ignored; only spaces, tabs and newlines are considered syntax.

The reporting language for a product I used to work on was the wierdest I've ever used although nothing is worse the Malbolge at least not yet. This reporting language didn't even have a name it was just reporting script but it was unlike anything else, 5 sections to Cobols 4 ( I hope I got that right ) and each one had a different syntax from really readable stuff in one section like ORDER BY CUSTOMER to a bunch of /g style switches in another. It did the job however and the job was a scary one, multi-dimensional database analysis at speeds that would make Larry Ellison with envy.

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

Well, if normally works from say 20-60, that's 40 years, but instead 20-80, 60 years. Then you can spread the same work over 50% more years. So you could work 33% less in your younger years. Like here in the Netherlands part of your current income goes into pension build up (about 10%), and taxes that will go into a base salary for pensioned people (not sure how much). One could scrap these institutions (and save a lot of money because these are just money eating money redirection schemes). So I think it's doable if just looking at percentages. However I don't see myself programming anymore at 80!

What's my beef with productivity tools? It's much deeper than a dislike for any particular tool. Charles Petzold already described his concern about Visual Studio in 2005 in a great talk titled Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?. It's a long read, but definitely worth your while. You should go read it now. In case you didn't want to take the time to read that article (but then: you're already reading this lengthy article), here's the gist of it: Via IntelliSense, code generation, Wizards and drag and drop, Visual Studio assists us, but it also pushes us towards writing (or not writing) code in a particular way. It railroads us. Does it make us more productive? I don't even know how to measure developer productivity, so I can't answer that. Do we learn while coding like that? Not much, I'd say.

Yes, a good discussion. I find it does. Why? First, intellisense helps prompt or discover new methods. It also helps me to remember method names. I guess age and mind rott are to blame.

Secondly, re-sharper, fxcop, style cop etc are all great in my mind. Again, it helps "standardise" code and teaches you to adhere to a code practice. It again helps to prompt and question what you are doing in the first place.

It can help with productivity.

However, I do understand where Mark is coming from. In the old days, you had to "know" about what you are doing as there was little information, books etc. however, I bet the learning curve was longer.

Not to mention, thinkgs like FXCop, JSLint, etc. can highlight things you're doing wrong. Personally, when it marks something as being a problem I look up why, then adjust my style to fix the problem both now and in the future. My future code becomes better as a result even without the tools.

Maybe it was this pay phone hack that caused Bells to ring in Barclay’s brain when he spotted the article in the Bell System Technical Journal. The article laid bare the technical inner workings of AT&T’s long-distance telephone network with clarity, completeness, and detail. It was all there: how the long-distance switching machines sang to each other with single-frequency (SF) and multifrequency (MF) tones, how 2600 hertz was used to indicate whether a telephone had answered, what the frequencies were of the tones that made up the MF digits, how overseas calls were made—it even included simplified schematic diagrams for the electrical circuits necessary to generate the tones used to control the network. Nothing was hidden. By the time Barclay finished reading it, the vulnerability in AT&T’s network had crystallized in his mind...

Operator said thats privledged information, And it ain't no business of mine.

By vertical sharding we mean a process of increasing application scalability by separating out some number of tables from the main database, into a dedicated database instance to spread both read and write load. Vertical sharding is often contrasted with “horizontal” sharding, where higher scalability is achieved by adding servers with identical schema to host a slice of the available data. Horizontal sharding is generally a great long-term solution if the architecture supports it, but vertical sharding can often be done quicker and can buy you some time to implement a longer-term redesign.

On January 25th at 23:30:26 UTC, the largest known prime number, 2^57,885,161-1, was discovered on Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) volunteer Curtis Cooper's computer. The new prime number, 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times, less one, has 17,425,170 digits. With 360,000 CPUs peaking at 150 trillion calculations per second, 17th-year GIMPS is the longest continuously-running global "grassroots supercomputing" project in Internet history. Dr. Cooper is a professor at the University of Central Missouri. This is the third record prime for Dr. Cooper and his University.

I’ve been doing a lot of calculations in both SI and US Customary Units recently. Normally, I can do the conversions at the end of a set of calculations, and the venerable units program works just fine for me. But in my current project, I need to show intermediate results in both sets of units and there’s just too much busy work in going back and forth between IPython, which I’m using as my calculator, and units. After a bit of hunting, I found the Python quantities module—it’s a bit more cumbersome than units if you’re just doing a few conversions, but it’s much better if you’re doing a long series of calculations.

There's a metric boatload of great information here on unit conversion.

If you want to transfer a few hundred gigabytes of data, it’s generally faster to FedEx a hard drive than to send the files over the internet. This isn’t a new idea—it’s often dubbed SneakerNet—and it’s how Google transfers large amounts of data internally. But will it always be faster?

When - if ever - will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass that of FedEx?

We stand today near the beginning of the post-PC era. Tablets and smart phones are replacing desktops and notebooks. Clouds are replacing clusters. We’re more dependent than ever on big computer rooms only this time we not only don’t own them, we don’t even know where they are. Three years from now we’ll barely recognize the computing landscape that was built on personal computers. So if we’re going to keep an accurate chronicle of that era, we’d better get to work right now, before we forget how it really happened. Oddly enough, I predicted all of this almost 25 years ago as you’ll see if you choose to share this journey and read on...

Robert X. Cringely revisits the history of his book and its place in Silicon Valley history.

Working on mobile systems at Google gives me some insight into what the hard open problems are in this space. Sometimes I am asked by academic researchers what I think these problems are and what they should be working on. I've got a growing list of projects I'd really like to see the academic community try to tackle. This is not to say that Google isn't working on some of these things, but academics have fewer constraints and might be able to come up with some radically new ideas.

Starting in May 2000 I was a member of a small team of engineers, game designers and artists working outside St. Louis, MO on a project for Sony Online Entertainment. Together we made Planetside, one of the only massively multiplayer first person shooters ever made. This is one of our stories.

All I had to do was test it until something broke, fix that and repeat. I just had to do it fast enough.

Just some quick commentary on Dell going private and Microsoft’s participation in that process. Let me start with something that should be obvious even if it isn’t. There are personal relationships here that exist just about nowhere else in the PC ecosystem. Where else are the leaders who created the PC industry still involved with the companies they created? Michael Dell and Bill Gates (and Steve Ballmer) are the only ones left standing....

A few months back there was a bunch of news around the FTC cracking down on these scams. Problem is, the FTC has about zero jurisdiction in India where the scams are originating from! They also have zero jurisdiction in anywhere that isn’t America so the effectiveness of the “crack down” is unlikely to make much difference. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that once again, this evening I enjoyed the company of a couple of gentlemen willing to help me out with my PC.

I don't have an action plan or any available magic that could restore Perl to its former glory. In fact, I don't think that's possible. However, Perl needs to become more attractive to younger developers and reach out to those who've drifted to other pastures. For the first time ever, Perl needs to figure out how to sell itself. I was hoping way back in 2010 that an official release of Perl 6 might prime the pump for that occurrence. Obviously, that hasn't happened.

If you've ever worked on a software development project under a time crunch, then you may have heard the phrase "mythical man month." This phrase will often get uttered by a well-read team member when presented with a business stakeholder who wants to throw more bodies at the project to make it go faster. As often as the concept comes up, it never really lives beyond my under-the-breath mutterings. I tend not to share it with clients. Because how do you explain the “mythical man month” to Mr. CEO In A Hurry?

A manager had a problem. He thought to himself, "I know, I'll solve it with more programmers"...

After reading Jon Skeet’s excellent C# in Depth - again (3rd edition - to be published soon) I’ve decide to try and actually read the C# language specification… Being a sensible kind of guy I’ve decided to purchase the annotated version which only cover topics up to .NET 4 – but has priceless comments from several C# gurus. After I’ve read a few pages I was amazed to learn that a few things I knew to be true were completely wrong and so I’ve decided to write a list of new things I’ve learnt while reading this book.

YAML’s security risks are in no way limited to Rails or Ruby. YAML documents should be treated as executable code and firewalled accordingly. Deserializing arbitrary types is user-controlled, arbitrary code execution.

For the most part, you never want to accept YAML from the outside world.

Unfortunately, this anti-pattern is too common. It doesn't hurt until it hurts and when it does hurt, it hurts a lot. If you are developing frameworks do not provide superclasses that framework users must inherit to use your framework. Inheritance is the one of the tightest forms of coupling you can use in OO.

As a framework designer, you have many other choices: eventing, listeners, and object composition.

Researchers have created software that predicts when and where disease outbreaks might occur based on two decades of New York Times articles and other online data. The research comes from Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The system could someday help aid organizations and others be more proactive in tackling disease outbreaks or other problems, says Eric Horvitz, distinguished scientist and codirector at Microsoft Research. “I truly view this as a foreshadowing of what’s to come,” he says. “Eventually this kind of work will start to have an influence on how things go for people.”